If Apple stores look like the future, the Micro Center off the West Loop is more like 1995.

The sleek Apple flagship in Highland Village, for example, features a ceiling of curved glass and stylishly designed Macbooks, iPhones and iPads quietly arrayed on plain tables. The boxes they come in are hidden away, while packaged software and accessories are given a similarly minimalist display. Customers line up at the "Genius Bar" to talk to T-shirted technicians.

The vibe at the Micro Center is more warehouse, or maybe playpen for computer geeks. Boxes of hard drives, motherboards and printer paper are stacked on shelves, crammed in bins or piled on the floor like 12-pack displays at the grocery store. In fact, wheeled shopping carts are parked up front.

The emphasis is on selection and pricing, not style, as it has been for two decades.

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But when the venerable Micro Center closes its doors this fall at 1717 West Loop South and reopens two miles away, in a new building at South Rice Boulevard and Westpark, customers will notice changes immediately.

Current renderings still show stuffed shelves and a "Build your own PC" kiosk, but the similarities to an Apple store are undeniable.

Like the "Knowledge Bar," offering free walkup tech support.

And notebooks, desktops and tablets arrayed on plain tables, beckoning to customers to get to know them.

"All will be live, and people can try them out," said Richard Mershad, CEO of the Columbus, Ohio-based Micro Center.

The new store will still have a lot in common with the existing location, including rows and rows of merchandise. The new location will offer 40,000 items, 5,000 more than before, Mershad said.

Other electronics retailers are focusing more on online mail order business, but Micro Center still believes in the future of the brick-and-mortar store, he added, and that's where 99 percent of its customers still pick up their products.

All electronics retailers have their own formula for the best merchandise mix and layout, and some have been tweaking their design. The emergence of online retail has them all re-evaluating merchandising and display strategies, said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at the NPD Group.

Retailers such as Micro Center and Fry's Home Electronics strive to carry as deep an inventory as possible, but it is hard to carry as many products as an online retailer like Amazon. Traditional stores, meanwhile, are strengthening their own online retail presences, Baker said. The share of sales being made on the Web is increasing, but it still lags behind physical stores by a wide margin.

"It's important to realize that 75 to 80 percent of electronics products are still bought in stores," Baker said.

Micro Center has billed itself as the "computer department store," he said. While it may not be as chic as an Apple store, it does display its products by category and has rooms for Apple products, gaming and more, and the retailer has a well-regarded service department.

'It's a great model'

A no-frills look in an electronics store can be effective, said Kit Yarrow, professor of business and psychology at Golden Gate University in San Francisco and author of "Decoding the New Consumer Mind: How and Why We Shop and Buy."

"There is nothing wrong with a warehouse look if the strategy is to sell tons of low-margin products without enticing customers to buy more than they planned," she said.

"In fact, it's a great model, a kind of reverse-showroom strategy. Let the customer get product information online and just sell with low overhead and low prices to consumers who don't want to wait or pay for shipping."

Other consumer electronics retailers rely less on high volume and more on "making the store an entertaining place to visit so people get new ideas, feel connected and develop loyalty," Yarrow said. "In other words, be more like Apple."

That's harder to pull off when a store is selling multiple brands, she said, in part because of the difficulty of developing expertise across those brands.

Kiosks and tablet learning centers are generally good ideas for any electronics store, she said.

Best Buy and Fry's

A year ago, all 24 Houston-area Best Buy stores got a Samsung Experience Shop, an area in which customers can try out Samsung's mobile phones and tablets, company spokesman Jeffrey Shelman said.

Best Buy's strategy is to carry a more edited assortment of some of the most popular products and partner with some of the core brands it sells, Baker said.

Fry's Home Electronics at 11565 Southwest Freeway in the Sugar Land area is much bigger than a Best Buy, with 140,000 square feet devoted to computers, appliances, televisions, digital projectors, office supplies and more. It also has a cafe. Fry's has three stores in the Houston area.

Micro Center has gone with a more stick-to-the-basics strategy, Mershad said, with a focus on service, competitive pricing and high volume.

The company has 25 stores in 16 states, including one in Dallas and one in Houston.

Micro Center's build-your-own computer department will be expanded at the new store, Mershad said.

That department does not account for a huge slice of the company's business, he said, but serves to remind people that Micro Center is a place for the committed computer enthusiast.